Re: FYA: "The ANOREV INTERCEPTS" [Usenet censorship] (fwd)

["E. ALLEN SMITH" <EALLENSMITH@ocelot.Rutgers.EDU>]

From:	IN%"llurch@networking.stanford.edu"  "Rich Graves" 24-MAY-1996 01:09:35.99

(quoting tallpaul)

>Because of the role I played in the campaign to get people to VOTE NO
>on "rec.music.white-power" many people have sent me e-mail asking about
>the vote results on several political news groups on the internet. The
>following is the latest data available as posted in the official USENET
>news group called "news.groups".

	Oh? And were you, tallpaul, behind the mailing to uninvolved mailing
lists of politically-biased pleas to vote "no" on that group, sans a copy of
the CFV? If I had had time, I would have voted in favor of it on those grounds.

>R. Graves was the original proponent of TPN-S. He had opposed the
>earlier RMW-P group but on technical, not political reasons, and he
>does, as he once put it, "not consider [himself] anti-racist." Rather
>Graves opposition centered on whether the nazi news group had
>demonstrated sufficient interest as a music group, whether it had been
>properly proposed in terms of proper USENET/uunet electronic paperwork
>at the like.

	I have read over the proposal in question, specifically its latter
version. It has a robomoderator that attempts to reach the laudable goal of
reducing inappropriate crossposting by persons arguing on this issue. While I
have my doubts about how effective this is likely to be (looking for whether
approximately identical posts with the same subject line had been posted to
the excluded groups would probably be necessary, to prevent spamming tactics
from being used), it is a valid goal.

>Highly skilled technically, Graves seems quite clueless about the
>nature of fascism as a political tendency off the internet in the real
>world. He has opposed individual cybernazi dirty tricks in cyberspace,
>including some first-class technical tracking of cybernazis using
>anonymity and other devices to hide their identities. On the other
>hand, he has announced, for example, that there are only some one-to-
>two thousand hardened nazis in the entire world.

	To my knowledge, Rich has not opposed anonymnity; indeed, he has
praised anonymnity as needed on groups such as alt.revisionism. I would be
interested in hearing whether tallpaul supports anonymnity; it appears to be
on-topic for cypherpunks. (Interestingly, the address from which various
non-political mailing lists were sent the aforementioned improper email was
either quickly shut down or the product of email header faking, according to
the results I got when I emailed the person back with a letter of protest.)
	I would also suspect that tallpaul may be biased on his estimates of
the number of full-blown nazis in existence, although this admittedly depends
on definitions; activists are prone, often innocently, to overinflate the
problems with which they deal. (I refer interested parties to the statistics
on rape customarily used by those promoting action against it; they typically
include such occurrences as sexual harrassment - a usage of free speech. While
I disapprove of sexual harrassment and tend to regard rapists as proper
subjects for the death penalty, I wish activists would be more accurate in
their statistics.)

>Graves's new view threatens additional ominous organizing by cybernazis
>on the net as they go for an additional news group even before the
>results of their previous organizing effort is announced.

	Cybernazi organizing is an inevitable consequence of the ability of
all minority political groups to organize better thanks to the Internet. They
have as much right to organizational activity as anyone else - including
anti-fascist activists such as tallpaul. I would suggest reading over some
issues of CuDigest with my contributions in them for further discussion on this
matter.
	-Allen